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This bull market is second to only one

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closing at record levels the past two days made it official that the benchmark S&P 500 now is officially in its secondlongest bull market ever.

If it sounds familiar, it should. At the end of April, the S&P 500 set a milestone by going 2,607 calendar days without a 20% pullback, better known as a bear market. That topped the 2,606day duration of the bull market that ended in August 1956, qualifying this as the second-longest bull in U.S. history, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Except that came with a big caveat: The S&P 500 had to close at a new high to cement this as No. 2. If it had suffered a 20% bull market drop before setting a new record, this bull market would have officially ended on May 21, 2015, when the S&P set its last closing high, putting it back to No. 3 in the longevity race.

So Monday’s 7.26-point gain to 2,137.17 made it official. The bull market is the second-longest ever at 2,682 days and counting.

However, this one has a long way to go before it overtakes the longest bull, which was 3,452 days long and ended in 2000.

Length is great, but the measure that really matters for investors is just how much the bull has increased their wealth. Since the end of the last bear in October 2007, the S&P is up 216%. That tops the 179% gain in the Dow Jones industrial average. The Nasdaq composite, struggling this year, has the best performance of the big three U.S. stock measures, up 294% in the bull.